What is Alchemy?

Alchemy is a development platform with multi-chain support and global reach, designed to facilitate the development of decentralized applications (DApps). Its main goal is to offer everything developers need to build and bring Web3 to life.

Its relevance in the sector has earned it recognition as the "AWS of Web3", managing more than 10 million users, mobilizing more than 100 billion dollars in digital assets and with a concurrence of more than 100 billion requests, which has led it to have a market valuation of more than 10 billion dollars.

Alchemy Products and Technologies

Alchemy has a wide repertoire of tools that facilitate the development of new Web3 protocols and the expansion of existing ones.

The intent of the platform is to allow applications to rapidly evolve to respond to the needs of users, without this implying the implementation of such improvements. Thus, developers can focus on what is really important: design and code these new solutions, confident that the platform will have the flexibility to support these new designs and allow users to explore them.

Thus, Alchemy has some quite interesting products and technologies, among which are:

Alchemy Supernode

Alchemy Supernode presents developers with an architecture adapted to Web3, which helps to scale all the functionalities of the nodes through dedicated distributed systems. At the same time, it guarantees the real-time data accuracy through its own coordination service.

Basically, Supernode helps improve the accuracy of the data that an application has, improves the reliability and scalability of the decentralized application that is built using this API.

Alchemy Supernode offers an infrastructure API capable of carrying out all the functionalities of a single node with higher availability and uptime, this means fewer interruptions in application service and in the number of users who can access it at any time.

The API also facilitates access to the resources required to run an application in a production environment and in real conditions. Improved APIs such as Alchemy's Web3 extension to the web3.js library and updated Smart WebSockets can help automatically manage the reconnection of applications without the events generated during the interruption of the service being lost, thus maintaining the execution of the system in all kinds of conditions.

That said, we can highlight that Supernode allows:

1. Increase infrastructure reliability necessary for the correct execution of the decentralized applications that we are developing.
2. Offers a high level of data correctness compared to direct use of nodes or other infrastructure.
3. He is able to offer dynamic scalability for our applications, which allows us to respond to the needs of the same in front of different workloads during its start-up.
4. Offer psychological therapy to employees instant start capability, that is, without configuration times or synchronization of nodes.
5. Allows run instant testnets to speed up testing and development of secure applications.
6. Includes improved API methods and WebSockets updated designed to improve the design of applications and their usability for the user.

Alchemy APIs

Alchemy APIs is actually a API toolset that Alchemy makes available to developers to facilitate the creation of Web3 applications and all kinds of assets that explore the possibilities of blockchain technology, such as NFTs or utility tokens. These capabilities are available for Alchemy-supported blockchains, whether they are EVM-compliant or not.

These APIs include:

1. NFT API, aids in the instant identification, verification, and display of any non-fungible tokens across Alchemy-supported blockchain networks.
2. API Token, allows access to information about certain tokens, wallet balances or metadata related to it. An especially useful API for building wallets or platforms that need this information.
3. API Transfers, helps developers implement the ability to get historical transactions pertaining to specific addresses to their applications.
4. transaction API, serves as a collection of APIs that allows generate transactions quickly, securely and transparently and adds advanced options such as gas usage optimization, enhanced transactions, private transactions, protection against MEV and the ability to simulate operations and obtain the result thereof.
5. trace API, allows to add to decentralized applications the ability to obtain in-depth information about the activity that takes place on-chain, both of the application itself, and of other actors that make life within that blockchain network.
6. Debug API, is an innovative Alchemy API that can help you get comprehensive insights and data related to transaction behavior. It also allows developers to have the necessary tools to debug their applications, in order to improve them or correct errors.
7. Transactions Receipts API, offers the advantage of getting all transaction receipts for a specific block, based on the block hash or by number.
8. Notify API, allows developers to add the necessary capabilities so that their application can display real-time notifications about what is happening on-chain.
9. In addition, developers can also explore the Alchemy Web3 API as an alternative to web3.js. It has been tuned to work with Alchemy without conflicts and offers many benefits such as strong WebSocket support and automatic retries. Among the supported blockchains are: Ethereum, Polygon, Astar, Solana, Optimism, Arbitrum.

Alchemy SDK

Alchemy also offers access to its Alchemy SDK, a complete suite of solutions built on JavaScript for interfacing with the blockchain. It supports the exact same syntax and functionality of the Ethers.js AlchemyProvider and the WebSocketProvider, so it's a 1:1 mapping for anyone using the Ethers.js Provider.

However, it adds a significant amount of improved functionalities on top of Ethers, such as easy access to Alchemy's Enhanced and NFT APIs, robust WebSockets, and user experience improvements such as automated retries.

The SDK also offers support for TypeScript, which increases its power and makes it perfect for generating production-ready products (ready for production or public release), with the support of the infrastructure created by Alchemy for this purpose.

spearmint

Spearmint is a free and automated platform that allows you to manage allowlists. An allowlist platform, is a tool that allows NFT developers thave more control over their communities and those in them.

The idea is to enable control over a series of duly defined rules, that allow to automate the mint of NFTs or tokens, only to those that meet the rules and criteria defined in the allowlist. This way, allowlists are capable of automating a tedious task, but it brings other benefits such as minimizing "gas wars", those events where users in a community compete to obtain an NFT and whose impact is directly reflected in the increase in rates.

Thus, Spearmint becomes a tool to avoid this type of situation and, at the same time, allows the creator of the NFT to lead his community to carry out actions that add value to it, instead of only generating NFTs based solely on who you can afford it.

Notify

Alchemy Notify is a tool that allows developers to add to Web3 applications the ability to notify users of Web3 events and transactions that they are waiting for.

This may seem simple and we even take it for granted, especially since we are used to applications notifying us of these actions for a long time. However, in the Web3 world, the structures used by Web2 applications cannot be ported directly and in most cases it is necessary to write them completely.

This is quite a challenge that developers must face. Notify arrives to facilitate the work and make these functionalities can be integrated into the DApps quickly and easily.

Alchemy Notify offers a complete solution for adding notifications to DApps. In fact, developers can configure notifications for their Web3 applications with a simple two-click process. Thus, for example, users can identify the cases in which deposits, in-game actions, purchases and other on-chain activities take place, directly in their application, without having to check a block explorer, facilitating and creating a more integrated user experience.

EasyMint

Easymint is one of the newer products within Alchemy and is aimed at developers who don't want to mess with the NFT generation process. The intention of the tool is to generate an NFT experience from scratch without requiring extensive experience in the sector.

Easymint makes it easy to deploy the smart contracts needed to mint the NFTs you want. Besides, Easymint abstracts cryptocurrency payments, leaving it up to the developer to decide if he wants to integrate it or if he simply wants payments to be handled by fiat payment processors, which makes it easier for the public to adopt this technology.

How to start in Alchemy?

Starting a development in Alchemy is quite simple. All you have to do is create your Alchemy account (totally free) and have a Nodejs installation, a code editor (VSCode recommended) and start reading its documentation.

The first step in any case is to generate a new application in Alchemy. To do this, click on the “Create App” button.

Next, in the dialog box, enter your app data such as its name, description, and the network you will use to build it. When finished, click on "Create App" and you can start developing a new application.

Before continuing, it is necessary that you identify the API Key of your application, this will be the method that you will use to access your application from the code that you are going to generate.

Once you have identified your API Key, you must go to a Windows terminal (or Linux console), create a folder for your project and execute the command:

npm install alchemy-sdk

With this simple command you will be able to install its SDK and explore the full potential of Alchemy.